[Thu 1st Mar 2012] Class Wars/Culture Wars: Owen Jones and the Chavs (London, WC2A 2AE)

[articul8]

That's not really the point of their argument nino. The culture industry as they see it isn't like some chomsky thing stopping stuff being put out there, it's more about what the mass nature of culture demands things do - it's a pathetic elitists argument against stuff from below.

is it fuck - that's the bastardised cultural studies version, promoted by people who want to claim that watching Eastenders or going round ASDA can be dead subversive honest

 

[nino_savatte]

That's not really the point of their argument nino. The culture industry as they see it isn't like some chomsky thing stopping stuff being put out there, it's more about what the mass nature of culture demands things do - it's a pathetic elitists argument against stuff from below.

My argument has nothing at all to do with Chomsky. It's about the bourgeois reproduction of power through media and cultural institutions. Jones gets his book published because he is a member of the class that produces cultural artefacts. He does book tours. He has, if I can use a Bourdieusian term, the correct amount of social capital. This enables him to become the poster boy of the leftish yoof.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

This enables him to become the poster boy of the leftish yoof.

Who are also overwhelmingly middle class, university educated and completely irrelevant outside of their self-congratulatory, smug clique.

 

[nino_savatte]

Who are also overwhelmingly middle class, university educated and completely irrelevant outside of their self-congratulatory, smug clique.

Which means that the same stale ideas are allowed to circulate and thus dominate political thinking.

 

[dynamicbaddog]

Who are also overwhelmingly middle class, university educated and completely irrelevant outside of their self-congratulatory, smug clique.

Is everyone who goes to uni middle class tho? Owen Jones makes no secret of his comfortable upbringing but he did go to Oxford from a state school. While there he says he was given a hard time by the public school educated students because of this . He nows says It’s time to abolish Oxbridge.
However Joe Baden, the founder of Open Book says that '' 54% of the Oxbridge cohort are state school recruits'' he says his original anti Oxford stance was' bigoted' and that 'The ability to attain academic excellence is classless and must be the goal for all students.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/jan/11/accesstouniversity.highereducation
I think I'm with Joe on this one.

 

[butchersapron]

Er - 54% of the people at Oxbridge are state school educated (and only 25% are comp educated) despite making up 93% of the population. How is pointing out the disproportionate amount of privately educated students there and what this represents for wider society in various terms bigoted.

Why should i care what Joe baden said four years ago btw?

 

[revol68]

is it fuck - that's the bastardised cultural studies version, promoted by people who want to claim that watching Eastenders or going round ASDA can be dead subversive honest

we've had this debate before, you're wrong.

also Eastenders is a thousand times more subversive than the Labour Party.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Is everyone who goes to uni middle class tho? Owen Jones makes no secret of his comfortable upbringing but he did go to Oxford from a state school. While there he says he was given a hard time by the public school educated students because of this . He nows says It’s time to abolish Oxbridge.
However Joe Baden, the founder of Open Book says that '' 54% of the Oxbridge cohort are state school recruits'' he says his original anti Oxford stance was' bigoted' and that 'The ability to attain academic excellence is classless and must be the goal for all students.'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/jan/11/accesstouniversity.highereducation
I think I'm with Joe on this one.

I didn't say everyone who went to university is middle class - what I said is that Jones is the new pin up boy of a clique of Labour left types who are overwhelmigly middle class, university educated and utterly irrrelevant outside of the chattering class bubble they exist in.

Bit hypocritical of him to demand the abolition of the institution that has clearly benefited him isn't it? Do as I say, not as I do etc.

 

[revol68]

I didn't say everyone who went to university is middle class - what I said is that Jones is the new pin up boy of a clique of Labour left types who are overwhelmigly middle class, university educated and utterly irrrelevant outside of the chattering class bubble they exist in.

Bit hypocritical of him to demand the abolition of the institution that has clearly benefited him isn't it? Do as I say, not as I do etc.

Not at all.

I' sitting typing this on a computer built from parts manufactured in china by cheap labour, whilst drinking coffee some poor fuck got paid peanuts to pick, does that mean I can't oppose sweat shop conditions or wage labour in general?

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Not at all.

I' sitting typing this on a computer built from parts manufactured in china by cheap labour, whilst drinking coffee some poor fuck got paid peanuts to pick, does that mean I can't oppose sweat shop conditions or wage labour in general?

It depends whether you were planning to build a budding career off the hypocrisy really - otherwise your analogy is stupid.

 

[revol68]

It depends whether you were planning to build a budding career off the hypocrisy really - otherwise your analogy is stupid.

So if I went on to write a book on my computer talking about working conditions in these factories?

Also in Northern Ireland they had the 11+ for selection when I was at school, I did it, got an A and went to a grammar school, was my subsequent opposition to selection at 11 hypocritical because going to a grammar school certainly did give me a foot up in terms of my qualifications and higher education?

The whole "he's a hypocrite" game is nothing but the small minded's way of avoiding dealing with the actual issue whilst feeling smug.

 

[revol68]

also nearly every person in the West enjoys a higher standard of living than most i the third world because of a legacy of imperialism and colonialism that both helped kick off the industrialisation of the west and uphold it, does that make every person in the west who criticises the empire and the ongoing wars for foreign resources a hypocrite?

 

[Smokeandsteam]

The whole "he's a hypocrite" game is nothing but the small minded's way of avoiding dealing with the actual issue whilst feeling smug.

What issue would that be then? That dynamicbaddog cites his empty call for the scrapping of Oxbridge as evidence that Jones isn't part of an overwhelmingly middle class, university educated and completely irrelevant outside of their self-congratulatory, smug clique?

 

[butchersapron]

I haven't a problem with own jones beyond what he argues - i think a huge part of what he argues comes from being in that elite bubble and how he got there.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

also nearly every person in the West enjoys a higher standard of living than most i the third world because of a legacy of imperialism and colonialism that both helped kick off the industrialisation of the west and uphold it, does that make every person in the west who criticises the empire and the ongoing wars for foreign resources a hypocrite?

Also if I keep using ridiculous examples to make my point people will perhaps forget that I really haven't got a point to make at all.......

 

[revol68]

What issue would that be then? That dynamicbaddog cites his empty call for the scrapping of Oxbridge as evidence that Jones isn't part of an overwhelmingly middle class, university educated and completely irrelevant outside of their self-congratulatory, smug clique?

I'm not arguing with the fact that his rather soft brand of left liberalism is perfectly in keeping with marketable mainstream "dissent" or that it's very surprising that someone from oxbridge should get to serve in that role (see also Laurie Penney).

I'm not a fan of his politics or a lot of the crap he spouts about the working class or Labour and yes as Butcher's said much of that stems no doubt from where he is and how he got there.

The only thing I was taking issue with was the idea that someone who went to Oxbridge is hypocritical is they argue it needs shut down or radically reformed.

 

[revol68]

Also if I keep using ridiculous examples to make my point people will perhaps forget that I really haven't got a point to make at all.......

they're all examples of someone criticising a set up that in some way provided them with a material benefit.

 

[articul8]

we've had this debate before

we have - you don't learn

 

[revol68]

we have - you don't learn

I'd suggest your posts about strikes around the olympics show exactly what is wrong with your understanding of the media and mass culture in general, treating as it does ideology as being essentially uni-directional and people as passive consumers of it. Your pathetic concern for how the media will spin things and the big other of "public opinion" (as mediated through media framed parameters and leading questions) perfectly matches the movement away from the materialist terrain of class struggle and all the contradictions and fissures within it, towards an idealist sphere of the media/spectacle/culture industry. This is the common weakness (to a greater or lesser extent) that runs through much of the Frankfurt School and even the situationists.

 

[articul8]

There's nothing necessarily uni-directional - the point is to take adequate account of the power of those mediating relations, the role of which is wholly explicable in materialist terms. "Public opinion" might well be an artificial construction, but it's none the less real for all that - its effects are material. Go round ASDA and have a wank

 

[revol68]

Of course people take account of it, they don't however get fixated on it and end up caught in it's inertia, nor do they think that because ideology and mass culture isn't a passive one way process that it's actually some pure bottom up yearning for liberation and that shopping at ASDA is some sort of radical self affirmation of working class desire, instead they might look at for materialist reasons for the rise of supermarkets and certainly not putting it down to them being brainwashed idiots produced by a culture industry.

 

[articul8]

Frankfurt School never included supermarkets as the "culture industry" - in fact, they drew on Benjamin saying the rise of consumerism drew on distorted utopian desires. BUT they didn't draw back from the distorting power of mediation/representation - the idea that there's some pure vein of proletarian authenticity (which seems to underlie half of the ultra-left posturings on here) is a total myth.

 

[revol68]

Frankfurt School never included supermarkets as the "culture industry" - in fact, they drew on Benjamin saying the rise of consumerism drew on distorted utopian desires. BUT they didn't draw back from the distorting power of mediation/representation - the idea that there's some pure vein of proletarian authenticity (which seems to underlie half of the ultra-left posturings on here) is a total myth.

I never said they did, as far as I'm aware the supermarket didn't really have much of an existence in their day, it was you who brought up ASDA when you told me to go wank around it. Also your argument as to why supermarkets can't be covered by "culture industry" is rather odd, afterall those areas that are included also draw on distorted utopian desires.

The idea of authenticity and the ever tedious search for it is actually something that haunts the likes of the Frankfurt School and the Situationists with their implicit (and often explicit) notion of real versus produced desires, the spectacle and instrumental reason, which take Marx's idea of commodity fetishism and stretch it to breaking point.

 

[nino_savatte]

There's nothing necessarily uni-directional - the point is to take adequate account of the power of those mediating relations, the role of which is wholly explicable in materialist terms. "Public opinion" might well be an artificial construction, but it's none the less real for all that - its effects are material. Go round ASDA and have a wank

ASDA? You might try Westfield, Bluewater, the Metro Centre or any other massive shopping mall....the "Village" at Westfield in Shepherds Bush, for instance, has all that lovely Prada and Louis Vuitton stuff to tempt you. Yes, you too can achieve parity with the mega-riche simply by buying this stuff (but you need to go through a period of self-denial first. I.e. go without food for a year or more).

 

[articul8]

Also your argument as to why supermarkets can't be covered by "culture industry" is rather odd, afterall those areas that are included also draw on distorted utopian desires.

eh? I'm saying that the accusation that the FSers are elitist mandarin snobs is a shabby misrepresentation from the likes of pomo cultural studies types who think that supermarkets and shopping malls are the site of dead subsversive consumer practices.

The idea of authenticity and the ever tedious search for it is actually something that haunts the likes of the Frankfurt School and the Situationists with their implicit (and often explicit) notion of real versus produced desires, the spectacle and instrumental reason, which take Marx's idea of commodity fetishism and stretch it to breaking point.

The FS precisely don't seek some immediate access to "the authentic" and repeatedly challenge the likes of Heidegger on precisely this point

 

[butchersapron]

Don't they have subs at the independent or something? How sloppy is this bagshawe flavoured intro?

Backbench Tory MP Louise Mensch is a craven apologist for Rupert Murdoch, and deserves to be exposed as such. This does not distinguish her from the Tory leadership, except that she is more honest about it and has less power to act on her sycophancy. But following the culture, media and sport select committee's conclusion that Murdoch was not "a fit and proper" person to run a major international company, it was Mensch who rode to the much-maligned mogul's defence on Newsnight.

 

[Random]

Mensch ministrates mercy to the manager of a major media company, a much maligned mogul

 

[butchersapron]

Can you spot the made up quote?

 

[Random]

Can you spot the made up quote?

There's only one quote, isn't that what the committee said about Murdoch?

 

[butchersapron]

No it's not. Hence wtf is the sub doing - and wtf is he doing?